Smaller Hours

Kevin Shaw

• Publisher: icehouse poetry
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780864929990
• eBook ISBN: 9781773100166
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Stately and majestic, yet scuffed with wear and disillusion, the poems of Smaller Hours mount the sky like columns and fora of some archaic ruin. Through these ancient halls, Kevin Shaw tracks Eros, clearing away the rubble and polishing the marble, along the way exploring queer ways of keeping time. Music and movies, clocks and inventors populate these poems. History casts a shadow over all.

Kevin Shaw's debut collection is a tour de force of control and grace; musical lines anchored by powerful rhythms dance into the reader's ear. The speakers of these lyrics encounter Nijinsky in a waiting room, Ovid at the laundromat, or re-enact a devastating flood after a night of drinking. From a mixtape full of quarter-century-old regrets, to the sensuality of a harmonica buzzing against pursed lips, to the violence and hope of Stonewall, Smaller Hours collapses the past with the present and the personal with the public, taking a sideways glance at historical figures — inventors, poets, movie stars — from across a gay bar's crowded dance floor.

one

Bind us in time, O seasons clear, and awe.

— Hart Crane, “Voyages II”

Clocked

One grandfather died before I was born.

One grandfather died six months after.

One left pictures; he resembled Humphrey Bogart.

One left a grey suit and a gold watch.

I learned to tell time, the story of an hour.

I called the position of big and little hands into the other room.

I believed watches had faces to remind us of corpses.

I confused grandfather clocks for the men in their caskets.

Throwback

The infield squared the wayward runner,

framing the missteps of the bullyragged.

I wrenched my body into its windup box —

as seen on television — spit, and readjusted.

Daybreak ushers a thirtysomething pain,

all in penance for being not-thirteen.

Whatever ease in sliding home was leased

the day before, now all limber’s lost.

How suburban the urge to steal

that same diamond’s glory, when I swore

I’d pinch-hit the future in another city,

not my father’s. Yet here I lie

in the same ache of his story, pitching

complaint, an adolescent in extra innings.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master?

Try winning.

Leavening

His business was the daily bread,

but Google Maps reveals a luxury

apartment remains instead, a substitute

in the street view of passing time.

A quick rise, from edifice to artefact,

without the mealy truth of hardtack lives

getting left like so many crumbs

in the butter.

A fetishist for the what-if,

I calculate the sack-weight of flour,

the heft of yeast and haul of water,

and thrust kettlebells in shifts

at an industrial dawn. As if

enough reps can build the muscle’s memory

of my great-great-grandfather’s labour,

with no rest for the lately remembered.

But there’s no flex in time’s erasure.

What gives? The muscle fibs

in fibrous tears that promise a kind

of closure. Some pasts are not reforged

by pumping iron; I’m only reminded

that he and I share nothing, except

the flesh doming through its repetitions

and sleep atrophied by early morning.

Turing’s Time Machine

The ticker tapes have run out,

swallowing ones and zeroes,

while from a perfect and pink aporia

dangles the hell’s end of a cigarette

that hisses goodbye, goodbye dear,

goodbye to all that in an ink blot.

I’m crossing old circuits,

secret and serendipitous, but to the naked

eye, merely a site to hack a beery slas...

Table of contents

• one
• two
• three
• four
• Notes
• Acknowledgements